When looking at how various operating systems do filename wildcard expansion (globbing), VMS has a nice syntax which allows expansion and searching of whole directory trees. It would be nice if other operating systems had something like this built in. The best Unix can manage is through the utility program find.

This module provides this facility to Perl. Whereas native VMS syntax uses the ellipsis "...", this will not fit in with POSIX filenames, as ... is a valid (though somewhat strange) filename. Instead, the construct "///" is used as this cannot syntactically be part of a filename, as you do not get three concurrent filename separators with nothing between (three slashes are used to avoid confusion with //node/path/name syntax).

You don't have to use this syntax, as you can do the splitting yourself and pass in an arrayref as your path.

The module also forms a regular expression for the whole of the wildcard string, and binds a series of back references ($1, $2 etc.) which are available to construct new filenames.

This is the constructor for File::Wildcard objects. At a simple level, pass a single wildcard string as a path.

For more complicated operations, you can supply your own match regexp, or use the derive option to specify regular expression captures to form the basis of other filenames that are constructed for you.

This is the input parameter that specifies the range of files that will be looked at. This is a glob spec which can also contain the ellipsis '///' (it could contain more than one ellipsis, but the benefit of this is questionable, and multiple ellipsi would cause a performance hit).

Note that the path can be relative or absolute. new will do the right thing, working out that a path starting with '/' is absolute. In order to recurse from the current directory downwards, specify './//foo'.

As an alternative, you can supply an arrayref with the path constituents already split. If you do this, you need to tell new if the path is absolute. Include an empty string for an ellipsis. For example:

'foo///bar/*.c' is equivalent to ['foo','','bar','*.c']

You can also construct a File::Wildcard without a path. A call to next will return undef, but paths can be added using the append and prepend methods.

By default, the module will use Filesys::Type to determine whether the file system of your wildcard is defined. This is an optional module (see Module::Optional), and File::Wildcard will guess at case sensitivity based on your operating system. This will not always be correct, as the file system might be VFAT mounted on Linux or ODS-5 on VMS.

Specifying the option case_insensitive explicitly forces this behaviour on the wildcard.

Note that File::Wildcard will use the file system of the current working directory if the path is not absolute. If the path is absolute, you should specify the case_sensitivity option explicitly.

This can take one of the following values: normal, breadth-first, inside-out. The default option is normal. This controls how File::Wildcard handles the ellipsis. The default is a normal depth first search, presenting the name of each containing directory before the contents.

The inside-out order presents the contents of directories first before the directory, which is useful when you want to remove files and directories (all O/S require directories to be empty before rmdir will work). See t/03_absolute.t as this uses inside-out order to tidy up after the test.

Breadth-first is rarely needed (but I do have an application for it). Here, the whole directory contents is presented before traversing any subdirectories.

Consider the following tree: a/ a/bar/ a/bar/drink a/foo/ a/foo/lish

breadth-first will give the following order: qw(a/ a/bar/ a/foo/ a/bar/drink a/foo/lish). normal gives the order in which the files are listed. inside-out gives the following: qw(a/bar/drink a/bar/ a/foo/lish a/foo/ a/).

By default, globbing returns the list of files in the order in which they are returned by the dirhandle (internally). If you specify sort => 1, the files are sorted into ASCII sequence (case insensitively if we are operating that way). If you specify a CODEREF, this will be used as a comparison routine. Note that this takes its operands in @_, not in $a and $b.

You can enable a trace of the internal states of File::Wildcard by setting debug to a true value. Set debug_output to an open filehandle to get the trace in a file. If you are submitting bug reports for File::Wildcard, attaching debug trace files would be very useful.

This is a get and set method that gives access to the match regexp that the File::Wildcard object is using. It is possible to change the regex on the fly in the middle of a search (though I don't know why anyone would want to do this).

This is similar to append, but prepends the path to the todo list. In other words, the current wildcard operation is interrupted to serve the new path, then the previous wildcard operation is resumed when this is exhausted.

The next method is an iterator, which returns successive files. Returns matching files if there was no derive option passed to new. If there was a derive option, returns an arrayref containing the matching filespec and all derived filespecs. The derived filespecs do not have to exist.

Note that next maintains an internal cursor, which retains context and state information. Beware if the contents of directories are changing while you are iterating with next; you may get unpredictable results. If you are intending to change the contents of the directories you are scanning (with unlink or rename), you are better off deferring this operation until you have processed the whole tree. For the pending delete or rename operations, you could always use another File::Wildcard object - see the spike example below:

all returns an array of matching files, in the simple case. Returns an array of arrays if you are constructing new filenames, like the $srcfnd example.

Beware of the performance and memory implications of using all. The method will not return until it has read the entire directory tree. Use of the all method is not recommended for traversing large directory trees and whole file systems. Consider coding the traversal using the iterator next instead.

Release all directory handles associated with the File::Wildcard object. An object that has been closed will be garbage collected once it goes out of scope. Wildcards that have been exhausted are automatically closed, (i.e. all was used, or c<next> returned undef).

Subsequent calls to next will return undef. It is possible to call reset after close on the same File::Wildcard object, which will cause it to be reopened.

On Unix, file wildcards on the command line are globbed by the shell before perl sees them, unless the wildcards are escaped or quoted. This is not true of other operating systems. MS-DOS does no globbing at all for example.

This module takes POSIX filenames, which use forward slash '/' as a path separator. All operating systems that run Perl can manage this type of path. The module is not designed to work with native file specs. If you want to write code that is portable, convert native filespecs to the POSIX form. There is of course no difference on Unix platforms.